Interrogation Drugs at Gitmo Alleged

President-elect Obama has re-affirmed his intention to shut down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. This will come as a relief to many who have been concerned about some of the ethical issues involved and exactly what has been going on there. While much has been made of so-called "enhanced" interrogation techniques (especially waterboarding), the question of chemically-assisted interrogation has received almost no attention at all.
There are certainly allegations of forced drug use at Guantanamo. An article in the Washington Post mentions many of these, and points to a 2003 Justice Department memo from then-Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo suggesting that interrogation drugs could be used if their effects were not permanent or profound.

Detainee David Hicks says that he was forcibly given injections; Briton Jamal Harith says he was given drugs that left him woozy and disoriented. The Washington Post reckons that at least two dozen inmates have made similar claims, but the Defense Departments insist these claims are "either fabrications or mistaken interpretations of routine medical treatment."

However, the search for a "truth drug" has been an obsession among the intelligence community for many years, and the indications are that this is continuing.

A recent report on the technology of "Cognitive Neuroscience," commissioned by the intelligence community, highlights the testing of new psychoactive chemicals for interrogation and other applications:

Secret military and intelligence-related human experiments seem to have ceased after the Army and CIA scandals of the middle 1970s, and a vastly more sensitive attitude on these matters appears to have prevailed, although some insist that secret experiments should continue. (emphasis mine)

The report notes that both the intelligence community and military authorities are generally "loath to violate informed-consent standards without justification (in accordance with the Uniform Code of Military Justice)." Prisoners, by and large, are deemed not to be able to give consent freely because of the risk of duress, and so cannot be used for drug tests. But this may not apply at Guantanamo:

A contemporary problem is the status of detainees at military installations who are suspects in the war on terrorism. Presumably, the ethical standards that apply to all human research subjects should apply to them as well. But if they are not protected by the provisions of the Geneva protocols for prisoners of war, the question would be whether as potential research subjects they are nonetheless protected by other international conventions, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948). Those technical questions of international law are beyond the scope of this report.

Christopher Green, who chaired the board producing the report, has had some experience on the bizarre fringes of the intelligence world. He worked on the technical side of the CIA officer from 1969 to 1985, and oversaw psychic "remote viewing" work. The shadow of other secret Cold War-era programs, like ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA, looms large in this field, and the report notes that:

Although anxieties about clandestine U.S. government activities are easy to deride, later Army and CIA experiments involving hallucinogens were associated with at least two deaths in 1953 and with multiple exposures of ordinary citizens.

Today, sedating prisoners for air travel during extraordinary rendition appears to be standard procedure. So it's not surprising that interrogators would also want to use something to make subjects more tractable during questioning. But although many different substances have been tested in the past, no magical truth serum has been identified. In Dominic Streatfeild's highly recommended book Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control, the author reports that by 1946 the OSS had found the most effective combination was marijuana followed by a mixture of caffeine and alcohol -– though administering alcohol to Muslims might raise other ethical issues...

Many new types of psychoactive drugs have become available in the last few decades, and some of them may prove more effective than the LSD and other agents tested during MKULTRA. But the intelligence report on cognitive neuroscience indicates that other approaches might also be effective:

"Recently, it has been documented in a small study that tDCS [Transcranial direct current stimulation – which involves putting an electric current through the brain ] delays a person’s ability to tell a lie."

There is no suggestion that this type of thing has been attempted on a suspect – yet -- and before trying experimental techniques on terrorist suspects, it's worth remembering that the majority of those who pass through Guantanamo are released without charge. A shift away from Guantanamo and to a more accountable system looks like a smart move.
Wired